Hinterland Online: Advanced Skills in Creative Non-fiction

Join Dr Andrew Kenrick, founding editor of Hinterland magazine, for a six-week masterclass designed to take your creative nonfiction to the next level.

This advanced workshop builds on core craft skills and helps you develop greater nuance, complexity and confidence in your writing.

Each week, Andrew draws on his experience as a writer, editor and publisher to guide you through advanced techniques – from experimenting with form and refining voice, to heightening narrative tension and navigating the ethics of writing from life. You’ll read the latest contemporary texts, try new approaches through focused exercises and push your work in ambitious directions.

In the second half of each session, you’ll workshop your writing in a supportive environment, receiving thoughtful feedback and honing your editorial eye. By the end of the course, you’ll have developed a more mature writing practice, deeper craft awareness, and a clearer sense of where to take your work next.

Thursday evenings, 6.30-9.30pm

15 January-19 February

£180

Two full bursaries are available. Please email hinterlandnonfiction@gmail.com for more information.

Please note, this course requires around 10-12 pages of advance reading each week, as well as reading fellow students’ work circulated in advance of each class.

See below for the full course programme.

About Andrew

Dr Andrew Kenrick is a publisher, editor and writer, and is the founder of non-fiction magazine, Hinterland. He holds a PhD in Life Writing from the University of East Anglia. He teaches creative non-fiction, biography and publishing at UEA and the University of Cambridge. His first book, a biography of the first-century North African king, Juba II of Mauretania, is forthcoming from Penguin Random House.

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Full course programme:

Week 1 Playing with Voice and Form

Learn to play with tonal shifts, intimacy and distance, and irony, as well as explore different narrative forms. Sign up for your workshopping session.

Week 2 Braiding and Layering Narratives

Experiment with structure, making use of motifs in your work and weaving together memory, reflection and themes. In the second half of the session, you’ll try your hand at a workshop – offering constructive feedback on another writer’s work, or receiving feedback on your own.

Week 3 Scene, Summary and Tension

Learn how to find the right balance between scene and exposition in your writing, as well as explore different techniques for raising the stakes and managing narrative drive. In the second half of the session, you’ll continue workshopping.

Week 4 Ethics, Memory and Responsibility

Explore what it means to write from real life, how do we use other people in our writing and what responsibilities do we have as biographers and memoirists. Andrew will guide you through a discussion of the ethics of non-fiction, followed by a workshop session.

Week 5 Revision

Drawing on his experience as an editor, Andrew will help you unlock strategies to revise and refine your text, moving from a first draft to a final draft. In the second half of the session, you’ll continue workshopping.

Week 6 Sustaining a Writing Life

Andrew will help you explore the life of a writer, from outlining and developing longer-form projects to avenues to submission and publication. You’ll finish the course with a final workshop session.

Indicative Reading List

Richard Flanagan, Question 7

Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive

Laura Cummings, Thunderclap

Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

Aminatta Forna, The Window Seat